didn’t realise this until a few years ago but apparently I was the ‘good girl’ in high school. My childhood best mate casually told me that her mum only allowed her to go places when we were kids if I was going.
This rational was 2 fold. 1) My mother was (still is) incredibly protective so all the mother’s knew that if Carly’s mum was letting her go somewhere, there was obviously going to be police escorts and body guards available to every child attending said event and the entire nation’s cohort of rescue helicopters would be on stand by to swoop in and save us in case boys tried to touch our boobs. The second reason was because everyone knew I was totally shite at lying and if something weird happened they’d get the truth out of me. My high school best mate had successfully hid her boyfriend from her parents for a year until her scary dad called me and yelled ‘DOES MY DAUGHTER HAVE A BOYFRIEND???’. I immediately burst into tears and wailed ‘Yes!!! He works at Dominos!!!’. I’m not disloyal I just panic under pressure and everyone knew it. If a parent was looking for answers they knew where to find them. Carly the Reluctant Whistle Blower.
Having said that I was a suburban middle class kid from Canberra so the danger factor in general for my peers and I was pretty low. It’s not like my mother’s highly evolved bullshit radar was sniffing out human traffickers and paedophiles but she could certianly spot a bottle of vodka in a teenager’s backpack a mile away.
Honestly though, I’ve never really been that interested in doing ‘naughty’ things. I’ve never stolen anything, hit anyone, broken anyone else’s property on purpose or ever been somewhere I shouldn’t have been. I know not everyone is like this and sometimes I quite admire people who do things like going to bed without removing their makeup or swimming without waiting the mandatory 30 minutes after eating. So I’m wondering about you know… what category to you fall into?
Rule Follower
You won’t even put your feet on the seat on the train and it wouldn’t even occur to you to keep the extra $20 change the checkout guy accidentally gave you. How would you sleep at night?
Rule Bender
You do the right thing most of the time but you take advantage of grey areas whenever you can. For example you know you aren’t supposed to run red lights but if you’ve been sitting there for 20 minutes at 1am and there are no other cars on the road… I mean it would be rude not to right?
Rule Breaker
Rule shmules. Let’s drop acid on a Wednesday night!
Me? I’m 100% a rule follower. I pride myself on doing exactly what is expected of me to the point where I’m a giant pain in the ass. I don’t even really know what ‘dropping’ acid is. I just heard it in a movie one time. I almost put myself in the rule bender category but I can’t think of one time I’ve ever done that except when I lied to a waitress at an event and told her was pescatarian (I’m not) because I wanted fish. I still feel guilty about it.
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What about your? Good influence or bad influence? Or somewhere in between?
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9 Comments
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Oh man. When crowds and visible authority are involved I’m a total rule follower. I ran into a friend queuing for a plane, and then we had to split because I was boarding from the back and she was the front. We were only two rows apart but I ended our conversation to ‘do the right thing’ rather than bend the rule and keep chatting! Realised after I’d walked onto the tarmac how ridiculous it was, lol
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That’s totally something I would do too! My mate was drinking a beer in the car while I was driving and I was panicked the whole time because you’re not allowed to have an opened alcoholic beverage in a moving car in Australia. She was like ‘Calm down. It’s just a beer and I have never seen a cop in Fitzroy ever.’ Fair call.
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Bad influence I’m afraid, I was that kid that parents didn’t want their kids hanging out with. None of my friends were allowed to sleep over at my house, EVER. So they’d have to lie about it every time! Wagging school, smoking, shop lifting, older boyfriends, ughhh you get the idea. One time my friend and I were hanging out and someone had left cans of white paint outside their bright blue house…so we paint bombed it.
I was awful as a teenager, but I had a really good time with my friends and I don’t regret one bit of it! Nowadays I am boring and have a boring white collar job so it was good while it lasted, I’m glad I got that shit out of my system when I was young so as not to be a fuck up as an adult!
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I never skipped school, not once. I would have had a heart attack! I had a few rule breaking mates in high school and they were fun to hang out with but I always left before the shit hit the fan! 🙂
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I was and still am pretty good and law abiding with occasional bends and flexes. Have never stolen anything, destroyed anything or wagged school but was the “finish my work and distract others” type. Probably still am, to be fair.
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Oh totally me too! Very much ‘Carly would get a lot more done if she didn’t talk so much.’
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I’m a rule bender. I’d work out a way so that I could get around whatever rule it was at the time, without my technically breaking the rule.
Such as inviting friends over when parents were away. I’d never ask my friends over, but I did tell them that no parents were there. This meant I could honestly tell my parents that I did not actually “ask” my friends to come over while they weren’t there… sneaky right? 🙂-
Oh actually I’m a bit like that too! I’m the queen of loop holes.
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Rule follower from way back. Pushing back a little these days on the rules I find absurd, but they have to be pretty absurd. Didn’t drink, have never touched a smoke, and recently went back to the supermarket a week later to pay for a box of Coke cans I realised the checkout person hadn’t charged me for. (They waived it, which was nice, but I still needed to point it out to stop thinking about it!) Oh gosh. I’m like the stereotypical movie loser, aren’t I?
